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Afternoon Tea at Vintage Salt, Selfridges

11 Oct 2015

Could there be anything better than cake, in my favourite city, with two of my favourite people?

I briefly spoke about my breakfast at 26 Grains in Neal's Yard the other day, and now it's time to discuss one very yummy afternoon tea. As with everything, I spent a lot of time researching places for Afternoon Tea in London, and I found that most of them were either crazily expensive (er, The Ritz, Fortnum & Mason) or just your typical cute but kind of samey tea rooms. We came across Vintage Salt in our research, which is an adorable little restaurant pop up on the rooftop of Selfridges. Unfortunately, I have just found out that it's closing and being replaced this weekend (!!!) but I thought I'd blog about it anyway.

To get to Vintage Salt you have to take a special lift on the ground floor of Selfridges, walk along a nautical themed corridor and enter the also nautical themed cafe. As you'll see from the photo above, me and Anna embarrassingly fitted in perfectly with the theme and looked like we worked there, damn that stripes trend.

Inside the café it was classy, cute, and felt more homely than hotel restaurants. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to go for afternoon tea somewhere seriously fancy like The Ritz, but this place was perfect for us. It wasn't very busy at all when we arrived which was also kind of nice, but I'm really surprised there weren't more people who'd heard of it.

We were able to choose from tea or coffee (there's also an option of Champagne Afternoon Tea), which arrived in beautiful vintage style cups and saucers and teapots. Anna's cake stand then arrived with her very own treats without chocolate, as she can't eat it. Mine and Rowan's then arrived and boy did it look fantastic! There were some delicious classic finger sandwiches in the middle, scones on the top and an array of beautiful, colourful treats on the bottom. I was excited to see the macarons as they're my absolute favourite, but along with that we also had some kind of a strawberry cream tart, a chocolatey cake burger and my personal favourite - an indulgent brownie topped with golden popcorn. I couldn't fault anything because it was all absolutely perfect. Unfortunately, we couldn't finish two scones each but I guess that's just something I'll try to improve upon next time...

The service was also absolutely fantastic and the waiters who served us were all ultra friendly and lovely.

I have of course already blogged about the delights of afternoon tea before, once in the amazing Bill's Restaurant and once in Oakley Hall, a beautiful manor house in Hampshire. Both times for my Mum's birthday (can you tell we like cake in my household?) So have a look at them if you want more pictures of cake.